Study Suggests COVID Affects the Brain
COVID has claimed many lives over the world and many lives have also been spared the death penalty, but if you have tested positive for the virus, even if its symptoms were minimal, you may want to pay keen attention on whether it has had any effect on your brain. The findings of a new study suggest that COVID may cause changes to the brain and scientists found significant differences in M.R.I.’s or magnetic resonance imaging scans before and after infection. The findings show that even after a mild infection, the overall size of the brain had shrunk slightly, with less grey matter in the parts related to the sense of smell and memory. But, the researchers do not know whether the changes on the brain are permanent but stressed that the brain could heal. But while this may be a tip for some physicians and patients to look out for, Deputy Manager of the Central Health Region, Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa says, it’s still too early to say precisely what the long-term effects of COVID are.
Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa
Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa, Deputy Manager, Central Health Region
“A lot of unknown still remain. We always discuss in our medical team what causes someone to have such a severe reaction or such severe disease and someone else might have similar profile but not as severe so there are many researches going on. We’ve got to wait to see. It’s too early to say definitely this is showing profile but not as severe.
There’s so much more that we have to learn about COVID and especially about the long-term effects of COVID because we do see patients who describe a change in a mood, a change in energy levels; some people say that they have not regained that energy level that they had before – that they’re easily tired. Even people with mild symptoms now complain of back pain, joint pains that they never had before. We have, in medicine, inflammatory markers blood test that are basically non-specific to a certain disease but would be elevated if inflammation or infection in your body. For instance, there’s one called the C Reactive Protein (test) and we’ve used a lot all over the world the D-dimer, which again is an inflammatory marker test but it doesn’t specifically say that if you’re D-dimer is high that COVID alone did that. And your D-dimer, because it’s an acute inflammatory marker, it usually goes down after a certain period of time.”
Dr. Diaz-Musa said there are other health conditions that could also show a high presence on the inflammatory markers.
